A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Friday, November 23, 2012

When we first showed off our Dual Thunderbolt motherboards several months ago, the message was pretty simple. Two ports are better than one, allowing you to connect double the number of devices you can daisy chain as well as giving you the option of dual DisplayPort monitors at the end of each chain. Pretty neat.

However, yesterday we announced one other major advantage of packing dual TBT ports, and is that it also gives you enough raw bandwidth to pump out enough pixels for 4K displays – the next revolution in HD entertainment.

Although 4K resolution content and displays are still some way off in the consumer segment, the technology is gaining momentum and will eventually become the defacto HD standard – branded Ultra HD for consumers. Right now of course 4K capable screens are still very expensive, but rest assured, the technology is destined for eventual ubiquity.

We currently have three ‘Thunderbolt’ capable motherboards – aptly featuring a TH suffix. Two full ATX boards in the form of the Z77X-UP4 TH and Z77X-UP5 TH, plus the Micro-ATX sized Z77MX-D3H TH. All three boards support our dual Thunderbolt implementation, a GIGABYTE exclusive as we currently are the only board vendor that has passed Intel certification for dual ports.

Each port is capable of carrying up to 2K of streaming media content, which combines together to output the full 4K to a compatible display. Our Japanese office are fortunate to have access to a 4K display and you can see that the two DisplayPorts are hooked up around the back in our test setup.